Quilting Bee Modifed Tee in 2 hours!
It's no secret: I love Camden's New Quilt Shop, The Quilting Bee located on Hwy 641 N in Camden!
It's a dream come true to have such a selection of high quality fabrics, notions, supplies and embroidery essentials so close to my parent's home. I'm not into quilting (yet), because I'm behind on my costume list, but I really enjoyed a quilting tote bag class I took with my grandmother at The Bee. So when I saw a t-shirt with the Quilting's Bee's logo on it, I had to have it. Plus, it had bee's on it- which fed my obsession with bees and yellow jackets because of Tech. It's a really REALLY cute shirt, but I wanted to jazz it up and play with my embroidery machine. So I decided to make a more form fitting adjustable baseball tee with embroidery embellishments. It really only took about 2 hours total, mainly because I had to make up a pattern for the sleeves.
Step 1: Sleeves
The t-shirt had plain white sleeves and I wanted red sleeves to match the logo and to make the embroidery stand out. I laid the t-shirt flat and cut the sleeves at an angle as shown.
*Note- don't cut the elastic collar off. I decided this would take too long to redo. I used the sleeves I had just cut out as a pattern for my contrasting color sleeves, I used some t-shirt fabric I had lying around, but you could also take off the sleeves of an old t-shirt. The basic shape looks like this:
Meet the sides of the bottom rectangle shape and sew together to form the sleeve. The fished sleeve should look like a cylinder with a triangle coming out of the top like this:
Pin the sleeve to the right side of the t-shirt, tucking the sleeve into body of tee as shown and sew:
You now have modified the sleeves!
Step 2: Rouching the sides for fit and flair
This is the easiest way to make large garments more fitted. With the t-shirt laid flat, cut the sides of the tee up to the sleeves. Then, turn tee wrong side out and re-sew sides together with a 1in seam allowance (1in from the stitch to the edge of the tee). Press seam flat with seam excess pushed to both sides of seam. Then sew edge of each pressed seam to shirt to make a casing for ribbon or shoe-strings (i used shoe strings). The top and bottom of the casing should be open. Now thread the ribbon through the casing using a small safety pin. Adjust the sides to your preference with the ribbon and tie in a bow.
Step 3: Embellishments with embroidery
I used the fonts that are already in the memory of my Janome MC350. The additional images such as the "Joy of Embroidery", "needle and thread" and the "buzzing bee" can all be found at http://www.emblibrary.com. It's my favorite place for designs at very reasonable prices. Here are some close ups:
I really love it! It's so fun and extremely comfy!
Friday, September 21, 2007
